360	EUCLID
of Book II, and a few of Books III and IV, and lastly a passage indicating that the editor will now give something of his own, which turns out to be a literal translation of the proofs of EucL I. 1-3. This proves that the Pseudo-Boetius had a Latin translation of Euclid from which he extracted these proofs; moreover, the text of the definitions from Book I shows traces of perfectly correct readings which are not found even in the Greek manuscripts of the tenth century, but which appear in Proclus and other ancient sources. Fragments of such a Latin translation are also found in the Gromatici veteres.^1
The text of the Elements.
All our Greek texts of the Elements up to a century ago depended upon manuscripts containing Theon's recension of the work; these manuscripts purport, in their titles, to be either * from  the  edition  of Theon'  (e/c rfj? ©ecoj/oy €/c£6<r6a>s) or 'from the lectures  of Theon'  (drrb crvvovcrLtov rov  Oecovos). Sir Henry Savile in his Praelectioiies had drawn attention to the passage in Theon's Commentary on Ptolemy ^2 quoting the second part of VI. 33 about sectors as having been proved by himself in his edition of the Elements; but it was not till   Peyrard   discovered   in   the   Vatican   the   great   MS. gr. 190, containing neither the words from the titles of the other manuscripts quoted above nor the addition to VI. 33, that scholars could get back from Theon's text to what thus represents, on  the  face of it, a more ancient edition than Theon's.    It is also clear that the copyist of P (as the manuscript is called after Peyrard), or rather of its archetype, had before him the two recensions and systematically gave the preference to the earlier one; for at XIII. 6 in P the first hand has a marginal note,' This theorem is not given in moat copies of the new edition, but is found in those of the old'. The editio princezis (Basel, 1533) edited by Simon Grynaeus was based on two manuscripts (Venetus Marcianus 301 and Paris, gr. 2343) of the sixteenth century, which are among the worst.    The  Basel   edition  was  again  the  foundation of the text of Gregory (Oxford, 1703), who only consulted the
^1 Ed. Lachmann, pp. 877 sqq.	^2 I, p. 201, ed. Halma.